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You know the sort of days where you get home from work and you feel old and tired? Right now my eyes are doing that Clint Eastwood thing, narrowing dangerously as a miscreant slinks into range, except my trouble is just that my eyeballs feel like they need taking out and running under the cold tap for a bit. And yes, I’m tired. Not deservedly so, not the worthy fatigue that comes from an honest day’s toil, this is feeling jaded from another dull day in a job that sucks the life out of me. But I can’t say I feel old.
I’ve reached that age (mumble-mumble) when my friends are out showing me how it should be done: house, mortgage, children in varying stages of development from unhatched to taking an interest in Doctor Who. And I nod and smile and enthuse at the photos and all the time I’m thinking hang on, aren’t these the people I was at school with? Aren’t some of these people significantly younger than me? What happened?
When I was a child, I thought middle-aged defined a definite time in a person’s life: their thirties. By my own definition, therefore, I am middle-aged. My friends are middle-aged or thereabouts. My friends have the things that my seven year old self classed as middle-aged: house, car, kids, all the rest of it. All I can do is marvel, because that scares me to death.
It’s not just that I’m an irresponsible commitmentphobe, although yes, you do have a point when you say that. What really makes me gibber is that inside my head I’m fifteen. And fifteen is not the age to be buying houses and cars and all the rest of it. (Procreation is another matter entirely, as politicians and statistics tell us.)
Is it always going to be like this? Or will I wake up one day and think, yup, I’m a grown up, where’s that estate agent’s brochure, and isn’t it time I reproduced?
I don’t know what worries me more: that it will happen, or it won’t. In the meantime, I suppose I’ll just carry on doing what I’m doing and ask myself, do I feel lucky, punk? |
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Posted by Angelfeet on 2008-05-06 14:31:16 | Rating: | Views: 72
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Sorry, you may well be stuck with this feeling.
I feel 15 too inside, but I've somehow managed to gain the child, husband, mortgage, car etc. (still scared of the car though).
It's a constant marvel to me that I'm allowed to do all this.
Feels like there ought to be a licence or something.
Sometimes feels like at some point I'll have to go back to school, that that bit is still real and we're playing at being grown up. Then my son wakes up and reality reasserts itself.
I have friends that are renovating barns and building extensions, who actually know what a catoniaster is and how to grow it! How have we turned into our parents?
But if you do feel like being a punk, 15 is the right age to do it. All that pent-up agression, the need to stick safety pins into oneself and dye one's hair improbable colours is best done when the skin isn't sagging and the dye is not labelled "covers all grey".
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Posted by rose22
on 2008-05-07 18:19:21
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